The guitar slinger was an instant hard sell to Music Row industry veterans from the time he pulled his two-toned ’55 Chevy into Music City in 1991. Timing could not have been worse for the edgy, electrified, twenty-one year old singer/songwriter. As Heatherly recalls, "Here I was in Nashville…the home of Steve Earle, Foster & Lloyd, Ricky Skaggs, Lee Roy Parnell…guys that inspired me to make the move and take the chance, and all the sudden, if you didn’t wear a big twelve gallon cowboy hat and starched jeans with boots the execs wouldn’t even think about signing you."

In the early nineties, every major label in Nashville was searching high and low for their own Garth Brooks. Heatherly decided to stay true to himself and remain the artist he had envisioned on stage since the tender age of five. "I’ll never forget," says Heatherly, "I was in this big producer’s office one day, my heart pounding with excitement wondering if this could be my shot and he put my demo tape in, listened to about half a song with his back to me in his towering black leather chair, swung around looked me in the eye and said, ‘I can make you a STAR in six months if you’ll put on a hat and boots!’ I actually thought he was joking…I responded, I’m playing at Jack’s Guitar Bar this Friday night…what you see is what you’ll get!"

Heatherly knows a thing or two about living on the east side of life. He would spend the next six long and grueling years waiting his turn at the majors. He played every juke joint and dive that would let him plug in and play, usually just for tips. It was on his way to one of those clubs in Marion, Illinois that he nearly lost his life due to an auto accident. His drummer fell asleep at the wheel sending him and band mates rolling over at sixty-five miles an hour, finally landing upside down on the shoulder of the highway. His prized ’87 Bahama green Fender Strat landed in the median about a hundred yards from the wreckage. When Heatherly finally crawled out from the demolished Chevy Suburban, he ran to his workhorse guitar, pulled it out of the splintered hard shell case and strummed a chord expecting the worst. "I could not believe my ears," Heatherly says, "My hands were all bloody and I was dizzy and dazed but my Strat comforted me when I strummed that G chord and she still played in tune! I’ll keep her ’til the day I die." Heatherly credits God for saving his and his friends’ lives and believes they survived for a purpose. Heatherly limped back home to his apartment in Antioch, just south of Nashville, and tried to put the wreck behind him. In between gigs, he paid his rent by parking cars at the Hermitage Hotel in downtown Nashville and painting apartments and houses on the weekends.

For a while, Heatherly was somewhat of an outcast on lower Broadway. The clubs were used to tried and true covers of standards and traditionally dressed troubadours. They didn’t know what to think of this hepcat with sideburns playing all original music with a three piece band dressed in thrift store bowling shirts or old ties and vests and two-toned winged tip shoes. For Heatherly, it was a style born out of necessity. "Yea, when I first moved to Nashvegas, money was so tight I was lucky to have enough gas to even make it to Tootsie’s, so I shopped at thrift stores and second hand shops because I could dress me and the guys in cool vintage duds for twenty bucks. That was back when vintage stuff was not considered very hip…I’m sure other singers probably thought I was from a different planet or something." Heatherly’s style of dress and nonconforming eclectic "rockability" started causing major buzz among the late night hipsters and college coeds from 1995 to 1998 at world famous Tootsie‘s Orchid Lounge. If you were lucky enough to have caught Heatherly’s show at Tootsie’s on any given Tuesday night, you would’ve witnessed what Mercury Records president, Luke Lewis did…hundreds of loyal followers singing every word to his self-penned songs, girls up on the bar dancing ‘til the sweat poured down onto the floor, and Heatherly singing and playing his heart out like a man possessed. "I tell ya, I wouldn’t trade those days for anything in the world." Heatherly says. "I played five or six hours a night with no breaks…I sang so hard my nose bled from not being able to hear myself over the crowd. Between BR549’s fans at Robert’s Western Wear and mine at Tootsie’s, people were lined up for blocks and spilling out into the middle of the road…I loved It!" It was that phenomenon that prompted Mr. Lewis to take a chance and sign the renegade guitar player in 1997 to Mercury records.

He also must have caught the eyes and ears of Shania Twain who invited him to play guitar for her on the 1997 CMA Award Show and then accompany her for the subsequent world tour. Heatherly was blown away with the chance to go on Twain’s world tour, but he decided to pass and stay focused like a laser on the dream he had been chasing for almost a decade.

The next three years of Heatherly’s life were lessons in patience. He went from performing out night after night, to waiting anxiously for a year and a half on the record label to figure what they were going to do with him. According to Heatherly, as soon as he got signed to Mercury Records, it was like someone slammed on the emergency brake and everything just kind of stagnated. Meanwhile, other labels that lost out in the bidding war for Heatherly’s contract were trying to jump the gun and find artists that they could mold into the Heatherly style before Heatherly, himself, could hit the scene. "It was excruciating for me to have to sit and wait and watch other labels in town rushing out their projects to beat me in the marketplace…out of nowhere guys were wearing vintage pants and shirts, growing sideburns and even going after the two-toned Florsheim shoes that I wore ‘til the soles fell apart, but all I could do was pray for my day." It didn’t take long for Heatherly to figure out labels have their own timelines and agendas.

In 1999, while waiting for his shot at the big time, Heatherly and longtime friend, Michael Hood, went to a junkyard in Knoxville, TN, to cut out seat-belts and buckles from classic cars for an idea they had conceived…a seat-belt buckle guitar strap. Eric and Michael wanted to make a one of a kind guitar strap for Eric to wear in his up-coming video shoot, "Flowers On The Wall." He appeared in the video wearing the strap, and when the video immediately went into high rotation on CMT and GAC, the incredible Hot Rod Guitar Strap surge began. "It was amazing." Heatherly says. "As soon as I buckled that first Hot-Rod Strap on, everybody including the video directors and producers were begging me to sell it to them! I called Mike from the LA video shoot and said…we’ve got to file for a patent on this thing cause people are freaking on it." As the video was quickly climbing its way up the charts, Heatherly was touring with some of the biggest acts in popular music. Exposing the strap to thousands of people every night, Eric was afforded the chance to market and promote the guitar strap that was, at first, only intended for himself. "It was awesome." Heatherly says. "I would be opening up for Brooks & Dunn, Montgomery/Gentry or Brian Setzer and their guitar techs would approach me after the shows asking me where I found the seat-belt guitar strap. I would laugh and say, I made it in my garage!" Heatherly started giving the straps away to the big acts he was touring with as thank you gifts because most of them were genuinely interested in it. Brian Setzer, a guitar virtuoso and hero of Heatherly's, called Eric and his partner to ask if he could wear the Cadillac Hot-Rod Strap for the cover of guitar player magazine in October 2001. After that kind of guitar playing demographic exposure, they were off to the races. Heatherly started receiving calls from rock & rollers...Kid-Rock, wanting a white leather Caddy strap, Lenny Kravitz, wanting a twenty-four karat gold plated one and numerous others. Heatherly and Hood finally received their design and utility patents for the "Original Hot- Rod Strap" and went into a full blown internet based guitar strap business. "It didn’t take very long," Heatherly says, "for Mike and me to realize that we were in way over our heads. This thing just became too big for us to handle and we weren’t prepared for the world-wide demand. Fender wanted it, Gibson wanted it, every guitar maker that saw our product at the NAMM show in Anaheim, CA, was begging us to do an exclusive deal with them." The two young entrepreneurs decided to sign a five year world-wide distribution agreement with largest guitar strap manufacturer in the business, Levy’s Leathers Limited in Canada.

Heatherly has two new inventions with patents pending. The first being a guitar mechanism called "The Overtone Dampener," the second, a unique clothing accessory but he still considers his greatest accomplishment ever to be his wonderful little girl, Christiana!

The single, "Flowers On The Wall," finally saw the light of day and ended up being the #3 Top Country Single of 2000 accompanied by a #1 video on CMT and GAC. Heatherly walked away with Music Row Magazine’s Critic’s Pick Award and the #4 Top New Artist of 2000 by Billboard Magazine. His debut CD, "Swimming In Champagne," was the #44 Top Album of 2000 by Billboard and yielded three Top-40 singles.

Heatherly toured relentlessly both internationally and domestically to support the record. When asked what was the most memorable performance he’s had since hitting the big time, Heatherly responded, "I guess it would have to be the Austin City Limits taping. I wanted to be on that show from the time I was a five year old kid trying to play that old beat up acoustic my dad found in a garbage dump. I’ll always cherish the memories of my father calling me into the living room to watch Roy Orbison, Willie Nelson and Stevie Ray Vaughn on PBS. The Opry was cool too."

A lot of living and learning has transpired since the 2000 release of "Swimming In Champagne," and it is apparent in his latest offering, "the lower east side of life."

"It’s the good, bad, and the ugly that makes my new material more intellectual and thought provoking than my earlier stuff." Heatherly says. "What the world doesn’t know is this is actually my fourth record…Mercury wouldn’t release my follow up to Champagne, then Dreamworks signed me and shelved another thirteen song CD that featured a duet with one of my heroes, the late, great, Carl Perkins. Four years of my life and work was just flushed down the drain. The fans became very frustrated as well. They were told these records were coming out and they never did. I was torn between flattery and sadness when I was told that fans were bidding from $80 to $150 bucks of their hard-earned money for a promotional copy of my Dreamworks CD because they wouldn’t be able to go into a store and buy it. As a result, this new record kind of incorporates all the angst and mixed emotions of the roller coaster ride I’ve been on for the last four years."

Eric Heatherly has been focusing on "the lower east side of life" since 2002. Getting back to his roots and blue collar work ethic, he glimmers with a renewed passion for making music. After his skyrocket to stardom with the worldwide smash hit single and video, "Flowers On The Wall," Heatherly got chewed up in the corporate music machine and became disillusioned with the way the music business operates. "It’s funny," Heatherly says. " I worked my whole life to finally get to the big leagues and then I make it to the world series, a dream come true… and then the coach takes me out of the ballgame!" referring to the mega-merger of Mercury Records and Seagrams in 1999. His debut CD, "Swimming in Champagne," was released in 2000 and according to Heatherly, barely got released at all due to the changing of the guards at the label.

Heatherly's newest release is, "the lower east side of life." The rejuvenated Heatherly has never been afforded the creative freedom he‚s had with this project. The release is on his wholly owned and operated NashVegas Recording Company label and KOCH Records. Heatherly disappeared into his cavern like recording studio at his home and wrote, arranged, recorded, produced and played all the instrumentation for this project with the help of his engineer, Jose Arbelaez, who added some keys, organ and percussion. "I wanted to do something musical that had absolutely no corporate fingerprints on it," says Heatherly, "to just be a father, a normal human being, and to write music so personal and emotional that it hurts."

This record is a labor of love and hate for Heatherly…it has its uppers and downers. The Fender endorsed guitar slinger went back to the well for a drink of fresh inspiration by teaching himself how to play bass guitar, mandolin, harmonica and anything else he could get his fingers on. Heatherly says, "I tried to get as basic as a seven year old kid excited about playing music for the first time. Really, the only way for me to capture that kind of pure passion again was to regress to playing instruments that I had no clue how to play. Basically, I started all over from scratch." The title of his new record paints the picture perfectly…for the independent artist, "the lower east side of life" may not have an easy street…but Heatherly just might be paving one for those willing to follow.

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